Written by

the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

That grunting and straining you hear is the sound of Gov. Rick Snyder’s struggle to reconcile campaign finance legislation recently adopted by state lawmakers with a pledge he made as a candidate to help voters learn who’s spending how much to influence Michigan’s political process.

But it simply can’t be done — and we urge the governor to stop trying before he hurts himself and the state government he has repeatedly promised to make more transparent and accountable.

Senate Bill 661 started out as an unnecessary initiative to double the maximum amount that Michigan’s wealthiest political donors and political action committees could legally contribute to election campaigns.

Rammed through committee on a party-line vote over the strenuous objections of campaign finance experts in both parties, the bill became significantly worse when state senators added a last-minute amendment to guarantee the anonymity of donors who launder their contributions through shadowy independent groups that are transparently shilling for a particular candidate or party.

So-called “issue advertising” by such independent groups now accounts for three of every four dollars spent in some statewide election campaigns. But under a controversial administrative ruling issued in 2003 by then-Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, the groups responsible for all that spending have no legal obligation to disclose the names of the donors who bankroll it.

It was these ever-expanding “dark money” campaigns that Land’s Republican successor, Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, sought to illuminate last month when she proposed new rules that would subject most independent spending to the same disclosure requirements imposed on those who donate directly to a candidate’s campaign.

“These ads are part of the political landscape, and we can’t stop them,” Johnson said in a statement announcing the proposed rule change. “But when they try to influence an election, we can make sure the public knows who is paying for them.”

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It was Johnson’s courageous attempt to make dark-money donors stand up and be counted that prompted an amendment in which the cynical authors of SB 661 sought to keep independent spending a secret shared between wealthy donors and the candidates whose influence they’re attempting to purchase.

Lawmakers in the state House narrowly agreed to the amended version, but many observers assumed it would not win the necessary signature of Snyder, who has repeatedly expressed support for efforts to broaden disclosure of campaign spending.

But late last week, the governor signaled that he might cast his lot with the agents of dark money after all, explaining that Michigan may have to preserve the anonymity of third-party donors to protect them from retaliation for the exercise of their First Amendment rights.

“What I would say is, after experiencing being around, I’m not sure I fully appreciated the balancing of the free speech aspect,” Snyder told the Gongwer News Service. “So I really want to make sure I go back and look at that.”

He went on to discount the importance of knowing the identity or motives of those who pay for political advertising. “You can go back to the very principles before we became a country, you can go back to the Federalist Papers,” he said. “That’s the point of free speech. It was more the ideas being shared, rather than who did it. Because what’s the consequences to them?”

In fact, the concern Snyder claims to have discovered only recently is the same spurious argument advocates of dark money have been making for years. They frequently cite a half-century-old U.S. Supreme Court case, NAACP v. Alabama, in which justices ruled that the state could not compel the civil rights organization to turn over its membership list. To give this analogy credence is to swallow the preposterous claim that corporations and billionaire political donors like George Soros and the Koch Brothers are as vulnerable to intimidation as the civil rights activists targeted for lynching in the Jim Crow era.

Snyder will not fool anyone with this disingenuous conceit. As Secretary of State Johnson has already recognized, the public’s right to know who is attempting to manipulate their government and for what purposes far outweighs any risk to the would-be manipulators.

The governor is mistaken if he believes voters will regard an unprincipled flip-flop in support of dark-money donors as anything less than a betrayal of his promise to seek greater transparency and accountability in campaign finance. To honor his own integrity, he has no choice but to veto the Legislature’s latest assault on disclosure.